WESTCHESTER COUNTY
BUSINESS JOURNAL
Coming up Roses
Family has designs for old mill
BY JOHN GOLDEN
[email protected]
In Yonkers, businessman Randolph J.
Rose has a dream. It is part of a larger
vision of an economically reborn city that
is shared and pursued by public officials
and private developers. His dream keeps
Rose awake some nights hatching ideas to
he opened a shop in Manhattan and later
converted part of a house he had bought in
Yonkers into an art gallery.
The longtime business partners have two
showrooms in Manhattan, Far Eastern Arts
and Antiques and Pallisander, and another
in Dania Beach, Fla. Rose has been joined
in the business by his wife, Ellen, and their
three sons. Their oldest son, Austin, a former
of Yonkers as a manufacturing center in the
19th and early 20th centuries.
A collection that occupied 10,000 square
feet of space in 1986, when Rose’s business
became a tenant in the former carpet mill
and furniture factory, has grown into 61,000
square feet on three warehouse floors filled
with handpicked pieces found in his partner’s
travels through China, Japan, Indonesia,
Thailand and South Korea. They include
antique Chinese altar tables and consoles
that retail for $5,500 and $5,000, respectively; architectural wood carvings; antique
Japanese dolls; iron water jars from India;
Buddhist temple toys; terra cotta burial pieces
from a Chinese dynasty dating to 800 to 1,000
years ago; and, from Thailand, contemporary
bronze sculptures of life-sized animals and
children at play and other activities, some
of which have been sold for public display in
Westchester County communities.
BuIldING HIstOry
Randolph J. Rose with a bronze sculpture of a giraffe in his warehouse.
make it real.
“This whole town has taken off because
rents have gotten so high in Manhattan,”
Rose said in his office at 500 Nepperhan
Ave., where realizing his dream could be
helped along by the tax breaks, exemptions
and other financial incentives available to
new and expanding businesses in the city’s
Empire Zone for economic development.
“I would think in 20 years you won’t
recognize Yonkers.” Rose and his family
hope to play a role in the city’s commercial
transformation.
Brooklyn-born Rose has been in the Asian
arts and antiques business since 1972, when
he joined founding partner Stephen R. Gano.
While stationed in Thailand during Army
service in the ’60s, Gano began shipping
back antiques he’d personally discovered in
Thai villages to his aunt’s antique store in
Greenwich Village. Returning to civilian life,
stock trader, runs the family’s garden sculptures business, The Rose Garden, in Dania
Beach. Jordan Rose is vice president for the
Randolph Rose Collection and Harlan Rose
heads up IT for the company.
Pieces from the partners’ vast Asian collection are included in a related business
that Rose runs from Yonkers, The Randolph
Rose Collection. “Bloomingdale’s is my major
customer,” he said.
Home furnishings from The Randolph
Rose Collection are featured in Bloomingdale’s
Time and Again antique shops at stores in
Manhattan, Long Island and New Jersey.
Since their start 35 years ago, Rose and
Gano grew their enterprise “into a fairly substantial import business,” he said.
That seems an understatement after one
tours their inventory of Asian imports at
500 Nepperhan Ave., a five-story, 170,000square-foot relic in red brick from the heyday
REPRINTED FROM THE ISSUE OF JULY 9, 2007
Rose bought the 125-year-old building in March from the family of its late
owner, Nicholas Martini. For nearly a
century, the building had been a part of
the Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Co.
mills, the largest carpet manufacturing
plant in the world, which at its peak in
the early 1900s reportedly employed
some 8,000 workers spread across 45
acres of floor space.
In April 1911, the New York Central
Railroad issued a press release announcing the shipment of 1.5 million pounds
of carpet from the Yonkers mill to San
Francisco and the fast-growing Pacific
Coast market in a special train of 60
freight cars. Valued at $1 million, the
shipment was the largest and most valuable “ever made in this or any other
country,” railroad officials boasted, “carpet enough to lay a width the entire
length of the main line of the New York
Central from New York to Buffalo, thence
to Niagara Falls and across the Niagara
River into Canada.”
After supplying tents and blankets to
America’s fighting forces in World War
II, the carpet company, facing increased
competition from less expensive imports
served by cheap foreign labor, went into
decline. The Yonkers mill closed in 1954,
when Alexander Smith & Sons moved it
Continued on next page
Continued
operations to the South.
Martini bought the abandoned building in the late 1970s, said Rose, and
opened MGM Furniture there. The highend furniture company had about 150
employees. The owner closed the business about five years ago. Before his
death, Martini had envisioned turning
the largely vacant mill into a design center, Rose said.
That is Rose’s dream, too. He wants
to turn his collection’s private showroom
for wholesale buyers into a public one
for retail customers and turn the mill
into a multi-tenant design center.
In the newly redeveloped Yonkers, “We
want this to be a destination building,”
Rose said. “We want to do our own look,
which would be a grouping of all kinds of
people in the home furnishings industry,
including antiques, fabrics, lighting, kitchen and bath, framed art, carpets. Anyone
on the high end, good quality.” Rose said
he hopes to get a zoning change to open a
restaurant on the premises.
“We want to give interior designers
that are leaving Manhattan a reason to
come up to Westchester County,” said
Austin Rose. “We want to start getting
the word out, doing local grass-roots
advertising.”
‘He truly has a dream’
Rose noted the $3 billion mixeduse redevelopment plan for downtown
Yonkers and the city’s Hudson River
shoreline proposed by SFC Yonkers L.L.C,
whose partners include Valhalla-based
Cappelli Enterprises Inc., as an example
of the city’s rebirth. “We want to join that
and help people find unusual furniture,”
he said.
The Nepperhan Avenue building
already has some elements of the design
center its owner envisions. Among eight
current tenants there are Casa Nueva
Custom Furnishings Inc.; Custom Crafts
Unlimited Inc.; Beyond Costumes, a
maker of theatrical costumes; and, most
recently, Alejandro Furniture Corp., a
Bronx-based furniture importer.
Rose recently had the 600-foot-long
building wired for fiber-optic cable. He
has budgeted $500,000 this year for
building improvements and renovations.
Rose said he will work with the
Yonkers Industrial Development Agency
Randolph and Austin Rose
on his plans for the building. His business, which has eight employees, could
hire more, he said.
Rose said inadequate parking in the area
could be an obstacle to attracting design
center tenants. “Parking’s the key,” he said.
The owner said a publishing company
in midtown Manhattan recently inquired
about renting space in the old mill as a
backup office for 300 employees in the
event of a terrorist attack in Manhattan.
The company, though, needed parking
space that the Yonkers location did not provide. But Rose, who is marketing the rental
space through Friedland Realty Inc. in
Yonkers, said he wasn’t interested anyway
in attracting major office tenants to fill the
historic building.
“I really want to do my love, which is
home furnishings,” he said.
“He truly has a dream about this
place,” said Austin Rose. “He really wants
to make it something special.”
Austin and Randolph Rose